Written by

Dan D’Ambrosio, Free Press Staff Writer

Growing up in Pittsford, near Rutland, Blittersdorf, 54, was fascinated by stories of a commercial-scale wind turbine that had been built on the nearby 1,976-foot summit of Grandpa’s Knob in 1941, the country’s first windmill to generate electricity for the grid. The 1.25-megawatt turbine produced enough power for about 1,000 homes with two blades 75 feet long, weighing eight tons each.

In 1943, the wind turbine’s main bearing failed, and it was 1945 before it was repaired because of war shortages. Soon after it was up and running again, the giant turbine flung one of its blades 700 feet, landing tip down with a thud, after a metal connector cracked. That was the end of the line for the ground-breaking wind turbine on Grandpa’s Knob.

“It was a great experiment,” Blittersdorf said recently at the headquarters for AllEarth Renewables, the company he formed in 2005, originally to make wind turbines.

Blittersdorf had tinkered with building model wind turbines as a kid in high school, and when he graduated from the University of Vermont in 1981 with a degree in mechanical engineering, his senior project was to build and install on the UVM campus a small wind turbine, no longer standing.

In 1982, Blittersdorf launched NRG Systems, based in Hinesburg, which today sells wind measuring equipment to wind farm developers, research institutes, universities and government agencies in more than 135 countries. Blittersdorf’s wife, Jan, is president and chief executive officer of NRG.

“Ever since I was 14, I wanted to do wind power,” Blittersdorf said. “I grew NRG systems out of a house in Bristol to a huge company. Jan has over 100 employees.”

Blittersdorf’s new company, AllEarth Renewables, has 26 employees, just the way he likes it. NRG was getting too big.

“As the company was growing up to 50 people or so, I started to get itchy,” Blittersdorf said. “Also mid-life was coming. I got the urge to get out of the company. It wasn’t a start-up any more. I struggled for over 20 years and got the company built, products built. My day was starting to be filled by meetings. A change was necessary.”

Blittersdorf’s thoughts naturally turned to wind turbines, his life-long obsession. He decided to make a small wind turbine for the home market. The company known today as AllEarth Renewables began as Earth Turbines. But it didn’t take long for Blittersdorf to realize his home turbines were not going to fly.

“We have 22 out there, but two years ago, after lots of money spent, the markets weren’t there,” Blittersdorf said. “Small wind has a huge permitting problem. You have to put them on high towers, and every one is a variance at the zoning board. It’s killing the industry, which has slowed to a crawl.”

“I realized, ‘I’m going to be out of money soon. I have to do something,’” Blittersdorf said, recalling the epiphany that led to AllEarth Renewables.

At a New Year’s Eve family gathering for pizza, Blittersdorf sketched out his idea — on a napkin, he says — for a solar panel that would track the sun, like a sunflower, increasing the energy production of the panels by 40 percent to 45 percent over conventional fixed solar panels.

“I wanted to see if I could do the small wind turbine,” Blittersdorf said. “We have a wind turbine with a patent and it works, but right now the market isn’t right. I’m not big enough to create markets, you have to follow things. We followed things into the solar markets.”

Blittersdorf’s idea for a solar tracker was not new, but the execution is.

“We do our own design from the microprocessor on up,” Blittersdorf said. “We write our own code, build our own controllers; a lot of companies can’t do that down to the microprocessor level. They buy somebody else’s and stuff them in. We believe it’s better to totally integrate the product and have control over software and code.”

AllEarth’s mast-mounted panels use a built-in GPS chip to figure out where the sun is in the sky, rather than relying on sensors.

“If you know the time and where you are in the world, you always know where the sun is supposed to be, so it doesn’t use any active sensors,” Blittersdorf said. “That makes them more reliable.”

By the middle of June, in a 25-acre meadow off of Dubois Drive, south of the Dynapower Industrial Park in South Burlington, there will be an array of 382 AllEarth Renewables solar trackers, generating 2.2 megawatts of electricity, becoming the largest solar installation in the state, said Doug Goldsmith, AllEarth’s chief operating officer.

Goldsmith and Blittersdorf have formed a new company, Chittenden County Solar Partners, which will own the $12 million solar farm, generating enough electricity to power about 450 homes. The partners have a 25-year power purchase contract with the state of Vermont to sell power to the utilities at a fixed price of 30 cents per kilowatt hour, under a state law called a standard offer program.

Blittersdorf knows there may be critics of the fixed price of 30 cents per kilowatt hour, when the current retail price is about half that. But he says time will prove the state has made a good deal for itself.

“Ten years from now as retail rates go above 30 cents to 40 cents it will be a deal for the state,” Blittersdorf said. “Twenty years from now, it will be a tremendous deal.”